The largest expert on the problems of language and thinking admitted that the brain is still the biggest mystery for science.
Every person has a complex neural network in their heads. If the neurons are pulled out in one thread, then you get 2.8 million kilometers. This is enough to fly around the Earth 68 times or fly to the Moon 7 times. And in a human fetus, neurons are formed at a breakneck speed - almost 30 million per hour.
Each neuron has up to 10,000 or more possible connections to other neurons. This is how we get a neural network through which information flows like wires. And it is processed there. If you count all these numbers, you get a quadrillion synapses, that is, connections in the brain. Quadrillion is an enchanting figure. This is more than the stars in the universe.
How do we think? Why, of all living things, only Homo sapiens has a language? Why do some people come up with brilliant ideas, while others do not? The answers to these curious questions at the recently held in Moscow the 1st International Medical Congress "Brain Ecology: The Art of Interaction with the Environment" were presented at a lecture by the famous biologist, linguist and psychologist, professor of St. Petersburg State University Tatiana Chernigovskaya.
MOWGLI CANNOT BECOME A HUMAN
- Who are people? - Tatiana Vladimirovna immediately puzzled the audience with a seemingly simple question. - This question has always been very relevant, and it remains now. In the 1970s, the famous director François Truffaut's film Wild Child was released. Now they would call him Mowgli. This name from Kipling's tale has become a scientific term: these are children who, for some reason, ended up outside of society. But not necessarily that they would have been raised by a she-wolf or a lioness.
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The film is based on a true story that took place in the 18th century. A boy of about seven came out of the forest. Wild - a man in body, and to everyone else a beast. Then the discussions began - who should be considered human? Someone who has no tail and hair? Does he walk on two legs? And modern scientists would also add: is homo sapiens the human genome? And in general: are we born or become people?
Scientists did a lot of work with this savage, but they did not teach him to talk. Remained a little beast. There was another case. In the United States, a girl was discovered that her father had kept locked up in a room for 12 years. During this time she did not see anyone and did not hear human speech. The best specialists - psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers - took up the girl with the same goal: to make her a human and to teach her to speak. In vain, although they have achieved some success.
What conclusion do scientists draw from such cases? Our brain is the perfect musical instrument. It is customary to say that our brain is a computer. And we have no other metaphor, because it cannot be compared with anything else. But we know for sure now that the "computer" in our head is different from any of those known to mankind. In our cranium, of course, calculations also take place. But these are not ones or zeros, it works on a different principle. It is possible that he is using a different type of mathematics …
Someone may be lucky, and by inheritance from grandparents, he will receive a wonderful brain that learns well and has fast biochemical processes. But if at the same time the child found himself in the Mowgli situation, or he is poorly taught, then there is no sense in his wonderful brain, which he inherited from his ancestors. Whatever instrument appears in your head, you need to learn how to play it.
WE HAVE WINNED THE NEANDERTALS BY WORD
“Recent studies have shown that Neanderthals are our relatives,” continued Professor Chernigovskaya. - Although this was doubted for a long time. It was somehow scary to imagine that hundreds of thousands of years ago, different homo lived on the planet at the same time. Imagine - there is a cat and a certain FARE. She is not a fox, not a wolf, she is one of the same, but not quite. There were different types of homo next door, and we were the strongest and won. But why did the INEHUMANES (or "other people") die? It is clear that we have outplayed them, including with the help of language. Homo sapiens learned to speak with sounds, while Neanderthals, as far as we know, only mastered sign language.
Of course, the advantage turned out to be on our side. It is one thing to warn about a threat with words - quickly, resonantly, understandably. And while you signal your fingers from the bushes, wild beasts will trample all your fellow tribesmen.
“But the languages seem to have grown from one root - from Africa,” the speaker suggests. - And then we went to creep around the world. And a terrible number of languages appeared - there are almost 6,000 of them today. Even though many of them have already died and are dying every day. Or maybe languages originated in different parts of the Earth. But then the question arises: what is it in biology that drags the need for the emergence of language? It's definitely not just communication.
If the main function of language was communication, then it would become more and more unambiguous. Meanwhile, all the languages of the world show exactly the opposite picture. It all depends on the context. In order to understand another person, you need to know who said, when said, what happened before, what will happen after, what others think about it. That is, the main task of the human language is NOT communication, but thinking.
LANGUAGE ALLOWS US TO ORDER THE CHAOS OF THE WORLD
Why is it so important for us to know how the language and the brain work? And there is no other choice. We communicate with the world through windows and doors - this is hearing, sight, smell, touch. But through this information only enters. All this is processed by the brain. We look with our eyes, but we see with our brain. We listen with our ears - we hear with our brain. The brain provides us with a picture of the world. It depends on him: what he shows will show. This is bad. Strictly speaking, for some reason we trust him.
Why should we trust him? And what reasons do we have to believe that we, for example, are not now having a collective hallucination? But I worked in psychiatry, I know that the patient's hallucination is the same reality for him as any other reality for us. There is no way to prove to him that the eight devils that are walking on the table do not really exist, and their brain gave birth to them. Therefore, it is so important for us to know how the brain works, because we are totally dependent on it.
And so to cope with the chaos, to which our sensory systems react every millisecond, the human language helps. Or rather, the brain through language provides us not only communication, but also the ability to fight this mess. For example, there are small, large cucumbers with pimples, rotten, salty - different. But for all of them there is one word "cucumber". If it did not exist, we would have to invent a new word for each of the objects.
It turns out that language makes it possible to assemble the world and structure. And the language uses contractual mechanisms for this. We agree that this is called a "microphone" and this is a "screen". This is the native code of one or more languages. And this general ability to work with the language is inherited. Therefore, no matter how hard you put into teaching the chicken a language, nothing will work. This requires special genes and a special brain. This is exactly what we have.
CHILDREN ARE ALIEN
- I want to tell you how children learn the language so that you are horrified, - the professor jokingly threatened. - The child is an alien. He comes into the world without knowing anything about him. He must find out everything about him. His brain helps him in this, thanks to a genetic program that knows how to extract information from the world. Now imagine that a child should master the language when no one teaches him. You might argue that the parents and everyone else are talking. But a child is anything but a tape recorder.
The child must figure out what is the language and what is not the language. He hears many different sounds. Neighbors throw pans, cats meow, dogs bark, cars creak brakes. What is this language? Nobody tells him. Moreover, no one tells him any rules about cases or endings. He himself writes the so-called language map. A child is performing a task that the best linguists on Earth cannot do. How he does it - we want to know. We try our best.
In addition, the child is surrounded by a language full of errors. If you record my speech now, there will be a lot of failures. Not because I am illiterate, just the language "said the wrong thing." The child, on the other hand, manages to extract the rule from the chaotic information. Only the most powerful computer, which is the brain, allows a child to do this.
HUMAN LANGUAGE GENES ARE NOT FOUND
The fashion of recent years is to find specific human genes, that is, those that others do not have, and which made us human. For example, in 2009, FOXP2 was opened. It was found in two families with pathologies from the United States and England. For example, the grandmother could not learn to speak, the second aunt could not read, the nephew writes with 60 errors on the page. In general, the Addams families … We began to investigate them and found a gene that is broken. It was very pompously announced: the language gene was finally found! If he turned out to be such, it would be the Nobel Prize.
Because that would mean that a human gene was found, not a gene for some grammar. But there was a nuisance: it turned out that cats, mice, crocodiles and everyone in the world have this gene. It's just that he works in a slightly different way for homo sapiens. But we had a question: why is FOXP2 so important, why does a person have so many failures due to its breakdown? We cannot answer this question yet.
ROBOTS WILL NOT WRITE "REQUIEM"
Recently, we are increasingly "cooperating" with various devices, for example, gadgets. Earlier I counted a problem on a piece of paper, but now a computer calculates complex calculations. So which of us is solving the problem? My friend the famous professor, American, scientific "bully" Jerry Foder wrote an interesting article "Where is my consciousness?" There he writes: I sit and work, and a robot vacuum cleaner is driving around me, such a big round tablet. He's like alive. He goes around corners, crawls under the sofas, wants to eat - drives up to the outlet, got up sideways, ate some electricity, and drove on.
My grandchildren feed him cookies. I think, since he is alive, then he must have mental representations (that is, when the organism reflects in internal states the changes occurring in the external world. - Ed.). I opened it looking for them, but found only cookies and cat hair. What does he think?
Of course, this is a joke, but the mass of devices around do the intellectual work for us. Or we are using them. Then the question arises: where do I end? Is the one in the flash drive also me or not me?
Supercomputers produce trillions of operations per second. And this rate doubles every three months. This is incomparable with the speed of the nervous processes in our brain. It turns out that in terms of speed we have lost this game forever. And there is no chance. What's the point? Have you heard of the computer to create something? Not in the sense that it was difficult to twist the Rubik's cube, but became Mozart or Pushkin? Not. He only has a high-speed search of ones and zeros. If you collect all the computers on Earth plus the Internet, you get the power of one human brain. One! It follows from this that we are going somewhere in the wrong place when creating artificial intelligence. That a breakthrough of a different kind is needed.
Yes, we also have a computer in our heads, as I said at the beginning, but something completely different. We have a lot of things going in parallel in some incredible ways. How are discoveries made? How can they be scheduled? A man wakes up in horror at night, writes something down, wakes up in the morning, sees the recording - and in surprise asks: who wrote this? Where it came from - he himself does not know. It was his brain that gave birth to it. Somehow instantly. With strange associations. To compute the algorithm of genius, I think one has to study people of art, not scientists.
If a fairy flew to me now and gave me a magic tomograph that would show me every neuron, then I would refuse. After all, there is a quadrillion of these connections! What will I do with the mass of this data? And you need a genius to be born who will look at this case and say: "This is not so, and it is not so, but I will go, perhaps, have a beer." And then he will come and say - this is how things are. This is how discoveries are made.
The largest mathematician, cosmologist and philosopher Roger Penrose recently came to St. Petersburg, spoke at my seminar at the University, and in Moscow. And he said, brain modeling is impossible because not everything in the brain is computation. Intelligence requires understanding, and understanding requires awareness. And what is awareness - nobody knows. We do not know how this happens formally. We don't know what algorithms, how to describe.
FROM THE DOSSIER "KP"
Mind chamber
Every person has a complex neural network in their heads. And if all neurons are pulled out in one thread, then you get 2.8 million kilometers. This is enough to fly around the Earth 68 times or fly to the Moon 7 times. And in a human fetus, neurons are formed at an incredible rate - almost 30 million per hour.
Each neuron has up to 10,000 or more possible connections to other neurons. This is how we get a neural network through which information flows like wires. And it is processed there. And all kinds of connections-contacts in the brain are countless. Not less than the stars in the universe.
PRIVATE BUSSINESS
Tatiana Vladimirovna Chernigovskaya, professor at St. Petersburg State University, head of the laboratory for cognitive research. Honored Worker of Higher Education and Honored Worker of Science of the Russian Federation. Member of the Council for Science and Education under the President of the Russian Federation. Member of the interdepartmental working group "Priority and interdisciplinary research" of the Council for Science and Education under the President of the Russian Federation.
